2012 Technology Year in Review: AMD Launches Radeon HD 7900 Series (January)

In January, AMD launched the first GPUs based on their new GCN architecture, the HD 7950 and HD 7970. Above that, these cards were the first that were manufactured at the 28 nm process node, decreasing power consumption compared to the previous generation. A core feature of the Radeon HD 7000 series is the ZeroCore Power Technology, which lowers power consumption down to about 2W per card when in idle, without any restart lag. For those who employ CrossFire in their builds, all unused or idle GPUs are shut down as well. These cards also provide support for DirectX 11.1. As well, these are the first cards to come with PCI Express 3.0 certification, which runs at 1 GB/s, per lane. As a result, a x16 lane would provide 16 GB/s of transfer, eliminating possible interface bottlenecks. Also provided was support for 4K resolution.